


Three Kisses

by ceresilupin



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Friends to Lovers, Kink Meme, Lyrium Addiction, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-04 01:54:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2905001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceresilupin/pseuds/ceresilupin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian is running tests to help with Cullen's withdrawals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Kisses

**Author's Note:**

> For a kink meme prompt (http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/10859.html?thread=45911403#t45911403).

“I know that you aren’t . . . that you specialized in things other than healing,” Cullen says.

The room has been silent for too long. Cullen sits naked to the waist on a table top, legs dangling over the edge, hands braced on either side of his knees. Dorian is somewhere behind him, no doubt sprawled decadently in a chair while taking messy but brilliant notes.

He’d traced his strange runes on Cullen’s back with a weird, watery potion that sank into his skin and left yellow-orange marks. As Cullen’s focused on the various aches and pains that had plagued him since he stopped taking lyrium, at Dorian’s direction, he’d heard Dorian’s quill scratching, writing down how the runes changed.

He’d said, some time ago, that Cullen could stop focusing, and he had, lapsing into a meditative stillness. Dorian had continued taking notes as the runes continued to change. But then his quill had fallen silent, stretching minute after minute, and Cullen could wait no longer.

He hears the rustle of fabric and the creak of leather as Dorian moves. “Delicately put,” he says. Dorian has a voice meant for mockery, broad and often inappropriately jovial. Cullen had initially thought him an idle and uncaring man, before being surprised by the profound depths of feeling in his dark eyes.

The feeling, and the intelligence. Then again, this man had helped create a spell that let people travel through time, something that even Corypheus seems to find novel, so perhaps his intelligence shouldn’t be a surprise. Cullen had hoped this intelligence meant he would know how to proceed -– how to treat these symptoms, so that the other Templars could be weaned off of lyrium, freeing their minds, preventing further madness like Meredith's—

“It’s too early to come to conclusions,” Dorian says. There’s a rustle as he sets his papers aside, and then the tips of his long, warm fingers rest on Cullen’s back. _More runes,_ he thinks, resigned, but he doesn’t feel the cool breath of the potion. “It will be too early for some time. I’ll need to run tests. An unbearable lot of tests. It’s quite a laborious process, really.”

Cullen’s mouth twists wryly, and in disappointment. “So I shouldn’t get my hopes up, is what you’re saying.”

“Now, now,” Dorian chides him. He is not tracing runes – the movement of his fingertips is idle. It ought to be odd. But Cullen has fought side-by-side with him, played more games of chess than he ought to admit to with him, has even let him chart and monitor the worst of his symptoms. Once, Dorian insisted on sleeping on a bedroll in his quarters, to observe his progress over an unusually terrible night. The man is probably the best friend he’s ever had. He trusts Dorian, is what he’s saying, but even that isn’t enough to explain why his touch is so – so expressly _not odd_. One might even call it ‘right’.

“This is me we’re talking about, after all,” Dorian continues. “Getting your hopes up is entirely appropriate, as a fitting prelude to my imminent success. Understood?”

“Understood, serah,” Cullen says dryly.

“Serah,” Dorian mimics, but softly, and with a profound absence of cruelty.

Dorian is unlike any other mage Cullen has worked with. He has no fear of Templars, no instinctive hatred of their abilities. When Cullen lectured him about a Templar’s place as a guardian of mages, as a caretaker for mage children cast out by their families, as a source of refuge and an ally in every mage’s struggle against demons –- he hadn’t scoffed, or laughed, or reminded him of countless Templar abuses, as others had. He’d simply tilted his head and listened, with big somber eyes that raised and lowered in slow, feeling blinks.

He’d then tried to brush Cullen off as ‘quite endearingly earnest’, but there had been something unsettled in his gaze. Something longing. Cullen knows he was cast out by his family, so perhaps that was it.

Or perhaps—Cullen’s back arches, gasping in shock as warm, wet heat touches his left shoulder blade – perhaps that wasn’t it at all.

“Dorian,” he blurts, quite urgently.

“Hush, now,” Dorian murmurs. The leather and fabric of his robes scrape lightly over Cullen’s back as his braces his arms on either side of Cullen’s. The tip of his chin just brushes his shoulder.

“This is up to you,” he says, softly, intimately, the room gone big and cold and quiet, in sharp contrast to the burning, noisy heat contained in the man behind him. “Tell me to fuck off, and off I fuck, to analyze my notes like the genius mage I am. Tell me not to fuck off—“ He presses another hot, hard kiss to Cullen’s shoulder.

Cullen’s head falls forward, gasping again. His skin, moments ago a simple canvas on which something useful might be written, is alive and taught. Feeling all over. He’s thinking back to that first kiss and his exclamation of Dorian’s name; it hadn’t come out properly stern, he reflects. Hadn’t come out stern at all. More a rasp, low with warning and tight with desperation.

Two kisses shouldn’t possibly leave a man so turned on.

He’s never been with a man before. Thought about it, maybe, but who didn’t? Idle thoughts. He’d had his vows and his duty, was surrounded by subordinates. Sweet Maker, it shouldn’t be possible to _want_ so much.

Dorian, he suspects, has been building up to this for a while.

“I can read a lot in these marks,” Dorian murmurs, lips brushing Cullen’s back in additional, light kisses. “A lot about pain, disrupted sleep, sublimated stress. I figure—“ He nips gently at Cullen’s right shoulder, previously untouched, and Cullen is too distracted to be embarrassed by his quiver. “It may take weeks to figure how to cure your withdrawals, but in the meantime, I think I can be of great assistance.” His voice lowers even as he shifts, moves, raising up, breath tickling Cullen’s ear and the bridge of his nose touching his jaw. “Great assistance.”

Cullen feels, abruptly, like a man who’s been running too long. Muscles trembling, mind in disarray, seeking nothing but relief. Carefully, so he doesn’t bump their heads together or knock him back, he leans into Dorian’s warmth.

Dorian hums, breath gusting in a long, low sigh. “Very good,” he whispers, voice wavering.

Cullen turns, abrupt, and catches his mouth in a kiss. Dorian surges against him, hot and with a puppyish enthusiasm that is so perfectly _him_ that it makes something feel light inside. Cullen touches his face, grips his cheeks, pulling him closer, mindless of the strain on his back and the fact that Dorian is practically climbing onto the table to get closer—

They break apart. “Maker above, you have to fuck me,” Dorian gasps. “Right now, yes please.”

Cullen squeezes his eyes shut, laughing silently. Trying not to panic at the thoughts, the _pictures_ his words summon. “Dorian.”

“Oh yes, you’re allergic to teasing. How tragic.” Dorian, now also atop the table, situates his knees on either side of Cullen’s legs. Cullen can feel the cold metal of his buckles and straps, the sharp contrast between them and the smooth muscle of his half-bared chest. “Then let me do this.”

He pushes his hand into Cullen’s pants without preamble, pushing them and his smalls aside. Cullen’s hips lift from the tabletop, pressing his cock more firmly into his hand.

“Maker, maker,” Dorian whispers. “Handsome man. Come on, fuck into my fist. That’s it—“

Cullen makes a strangled noise, angling his face away from the heat of Dorian’s neck, struggling for breath. Still arching up _still fucking his fist_ eyes squeezed shut, face hot and no doubt red. He gasps for air as Dorian finds a smooth, easy movement, strong arms pulling at his hips, pulling him back snug against the other man’s body when his thrusts take him away.

“Feels good?” Dorian asks, faux idle, and Cullen laughs briefly and seriously considers strangling him. Dorian laughs, too, because he’s never happier than when he’s getting on someone’s nerves. “Yes, that’s right. Just like that. Come on, dear Cullen, you know what to do. Come for me.”

Cullen gasps again, smile still tugging at his lips, stomach still shaking in a nervous laugh. “Dorian—“

“Hmmm.” He feels the tickle of Dorian’s lips and mustache against his cheek as he smiles. “Very good, I like it when you say that. Again.” But Cullen can’t. He flails one hand – he’s actually just remembered that he _has_ hands – to rest on top of Dorian’s, the hand on his cock. The other comes up to grip the hair at the back of Dorian’s neck.

Dorian grunts, and Cullen feels the push of his hips, an uncontrolled thrust. “Also good,” he breathes, and Cullen half-laughs, half-sobs, can’t think, so close—

He comes with the muscles of his legs straining, pushing against air as he has no leverage, no ground to stand on. Dorian groans with him, biting lightly at the swell of his neck, pressing his face to every bit of skin he can reach and kissing, light kisses, desperate strength in his chest and shoulders.

Panting, Cullen sags back, trembling as the last tickles of sensation leave him. He loosens his grip on Dorian’s hair and turns it into an instinctive stroke, up and down the nape of his neck. Never been with a man, been a decade since lying with a woman, but apparently his body has a knowledge all of its own.

Dorian hugs him around the waist, still breathing hard, as Cullen’s breath slowly evens out. When he turns, eyes cracking open, they meet in a slow, slick kiss. Their second kiss, Cullen realizes, and somehow numbering it just – throws everything into question. What they did, what they’ll do next, what it all _means_ —

But first, he’s being ungentlemanly.

“I can’t . . . fuck you now,” Cullen points out, stumbling only a little over the word. Embarrassing, too, to be reminded of his now-limp cock, of how much control he’d just lost.

“Oh, I’m sure we can work something out,” Dorian rasps, arms still wrapped around him tight, face still pressed to his neck. “If you want. Please.”

That _please_ had come out suspiciously small.

“I don’t think,” Cullen says slowly, a dawning realization that takes place out loud, “that there's anything you could ask of me, that I wouldn't say yes to,” and it’s true.

They seal it with their third kiss, before moving on to bed.


End file.
